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Category Archives: Economics Lessons

I saw this picture on Facebook today. It is a very simple explanation of a very complicated problem: how inflation robs all of us, predominately by destroying the purchasing power of accumulated savings and fueling an unsustainable debt-cycle. The other side of this is Malinvestment, which when coupled with the effects of inflation, destroy an economy from the inside-out.

Unfortunately, the comments were full of fail: Once you buy in to the propaganda known as the American Dream, there is virtually no limit to the bullshit you’ll apologize for. I hate to paint with a broad brush, but it seems like people apologize for capitalism because they’ve bought in to the propaganda and they honestly do believe that one day if they just work hard enough they will also succeed. And although some people do succeed, these are exceptions rather than the rule.

Oh, the lulz. Except they're serious.

John: Good for you. You took an opportunity that most people don’t have. Maybe you had a good idea that others didn’t think of. Maybe you had some capital saved up that many people don’t have. Maybe you just got lucky. Just because you were raised to believe something doesn’t make it true. Lots of people work their asses of and still struggle to make ends meet. A generation ago families could (and often did) live comfortably middle-class lifestyles on a single income whereas today it takes 2 parents working full time to scrape by. The most important part about a free market is the freedom. If you’re working 80 hours a week to get by, you’re not free, you’re indebted to an exploitative system.

You are working 80 hours a week non-stop just to “do alright”. Is this the sort of world you want for future generations? Should it be this hard to put food on the table and a roof over your children’s heads?

Ruth: Try to read your words with someone else’s brain, preferably not John’s because you’re making the same mistakes. You believe that the 1% normally acquire their wealth through honest hard work, frugality and ingenuity, the fruits of which labor is passed from generation to generation. This ignores a great many people who succeed only insofar as they can exploit a system of privilege to their advantage. It is not a level playing field and success is not determined predominately by merit.

There are a million fucking reasons why we’re not free and we don’t have a free market, and each of these distortions has a ripple-effect of consequences that further distort the array of opportunities available, the choices we are presented. You’re forget that most of the people who play in to this game will never make it, most will fail somewhere along the way, thus the “1%”. Is this the sort of world that you want?

Bill:You’re making a common mistake. Maybe you believe that the bastardized “market” that we have is a near-enough approximation of what a really free market would look like just because we get the illusion of choice in some areas of our lives. The rich are rich because they work hard and the poor are poor because they’re dumb and lazy. Way to blame the victims. Do you really believe that Goldman Sachs isn’t rigging the game? Is this the sort of world that you want?

Donald: You are a beacon of light in an otherwise regrettable thread.

The rest of you, you need to pull your heads out of the fucking sand and understand the problems we face for what they are. People are protesting because they want to work and can’t find jobs. They’re protesting because at every level, their governments and elected “leaders” have let them down. They’re protesting because they’ve realized that the illusion of meritocracy is just an illusion, we don’t live in a free market or anything remotely resembling one, success is an exception rather than the rule, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to get by and to plan and save for the future.

As the old saying goes, “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” and there are few times more desperate for a majority of laborers living hand-to-mouth, than being put out of work en masse. Adamic’s well-researched, but surprisingly easy-to-read Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence In America demonstrates the desperate side of the labor struggle which is rarely, if ever, taught in classrooms.

As strikes and “riots” are often portrayed in the media as unprovoked violence against the employers or scab workers, and haphazard destruction of the employers’ properties, Adamic will not let the reader ignore that in many (most?) cases, it is the the monopolists and the concentrated Big Business who are directly responsible for the opening salvo (i.e., hired thugs to bust the strikes, agents provocateurs, corrupt politicians, etc.). He also notes that while many attempts at labor organizing were demonized and even prosecuted as illegal interference with commerce, etc., the duplicitous nature of the American legal system often ignored equally heinous interference with commerce when done on behalf of organized Big Business.

Dynamite also presents a fairly compelling argument as to why organized laborers believe in a “right” to their jobs, which if you accept it, means that scab laborers would be guilty of violating that right and to some degree deserving of reactions as would any common criminal who violated you otherwise. This was an argument I had not previously encountered, but and it was definitely an “Aha!” kind of moment when I picked up on it.

Adamic is unabashedly anti-capitalist, so his character descriptions tend to favor the champions of labor, and make the enemies of labor seem characteristically repugnant. That said, he keeps a fairly even keel and is not afraid to highlight labors shortcomings, infightings, especially weak leadership, a “We’ll get ours and damn the rest” mentality (which he condemns as a byproduct of capitalism) , failures of the AFL as well as the politicking and racketeering scandals which plagued early labor organizations and it would seem, doomed them for the future.

Although Adamic does not explicitly endorse “dynamite” as a means to achieving labor’s goals, I think he is without a doubt sympathetic to its use; at least under certain desperate circumstances the majority of which cannot be blamed on the working classes.

If you’re a left-leaning libertarian or a big-L libertarian of the American persuasion, or even fancy yourself an “anarcho-capitalist” then this book will definitely give you pause to reconsider some of your positions. Otherwise I’d recommend it for anyone interested in the history of the American labor struggles, or anyone looking for an alternate account of this history.

It’s often argued that eliminating such-and-such a federal department will make us richer. Or that removing this-and-that tax burden will let us keep more of our paychecks. You’ve heard it before. It goes something like this:

If we get rid of the onerous taxes on the middle class, the regressive taxes that disadvantage the poor, the myriad regulations which hamstring businesses (the right-libertarian does not qualify, but the left-libertarian will probably refine the definition to include “small business, cooperatives, etc. in lieu of capital-intensive, oligopolistic industry) we’ll all be richer.

Depending on the degree of “libertarian” you’re dealing with they may add optional conditions like:

And just for Karma points, let’s stop dropping bombs on kids in Pakistan and funding death squads in South America, and you know what else, it doesn’t really matter if we put another man on the moon…

I’m with you so far [1]. But the argument concludes that we just axe all this stuff and your net income goes up, voila you are richer and then this becomes some sort of justification for the “free market”.

Wrong.

If you are going to be better-off in a free market, it’s not simply because you’ll be “earning more money”.

It ain’t about that 10% or 20% that Uncle Sam takes out of your paycheck every week.

Your nominally “higher” income isn’t going to matter much [2]. There will certainly be discomfort in the short- to medium-term as generations of capital misallocation are revealed all at once. But prices, like water, eventually find their level. So, the fact that you might have “more” money is probably not going to matter.

Nor is it about the paltry few cents that you pay for dozens of programs you probably vociferously oppose, (e.g., public health clinics, welfare for displaced/redundant labor force, mass transit, free birth control for high school kids or low-income people, crappy artwork in public places, etc.) but in the grand scheme of things don’t amount to a hill of beans.

If your primary objection is that the government is ripping you off a few cents on every dollar that you earn, if your strongest talking point is simply, “Well, we could all be richer”, don’t act surprised when people look at you like some bougie sonofabitch who’s just using the rhetoric of “liberty” in order to appeal to that me-vs-the-world selfishness with which you’ve been indoctrinated since kindergarten.

So this is a terrible argument: not only is it objectively incorrect, but it relies on gross exaggerations (if we stopped paying welfare – of course without examining or addressing the root causes of the poverty in society, we’d be richer!), and also because it espouses the very worst aspects of consumerism.

What matters in a free market is the opportunities which freedom presents.

In my estimation it is these intangible effects of such a shake-up that will really improve everyone’s lot in the long-run.

Deep down inside I’d like to believe that we all want freedom, security, a modicum of material comfort, leisure time to spend recreating and enjoying with our friends and families. Money-blind, though, so many have been brainwashed in to believing that these “luxuries” can only be purchased, and the price is perpetual labor & toil to make ends meet and provide for the occasional escape. But that ain’t freedom, and it ain’t security[3] either. It’s a very, very poor substitute at best.

Imagine the freedom to enjoy your life. Real equality of opportunity. The wherewithal to carve your own destiny, rather than trying desperately scrambling to fit perfectly in to some cookie-cutter pre-fab box that’s been forced in front of you like you’re the next interchangeable and totally replaceable piece rolling down the assembly line of life. And if everyone else could do the same? especially if the poorest & least-fortunate among us could substantially improve their lots as well?

The most important part about a free market is not that you will make more money (because you probably won’t, but that won’t even matter!). It’s the freedom, stupid! It’s working within a society, shaping those institutions which foster the freedom, security and well-being which is what we all really want (not that bullshit illusion of prosperity known as “The American DreamTM“); a world where it doesn’t take 50+ hours of nose-to-the-grindstone or mind-numbing, paper-pushing, rubber-fucking-stamping “labor” to provide for your family, all the while barely making ends meet.

You can’t buy freedom. And you can’t really replace it. Understand that freedom contributes to real wealth, not the other way around, and that we need to be working towards freedom as an end in itself and not towards monetary wealth as some proxy or substitute for what we really deserve.

1.Setting aside the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing arguments, of course, viz., some advocate policy with sleight of hand that really means, “Lower taxes for me, but not for thee!” in a close-minded zero-sum mentality; they just want a bigger piece of the pie and they are not at all interested in making that pie bigger. It’s easier to just take someone else’s.

2. Prices (including the price of labor, a/k/a “wages”) might rise because of the psychic effect of “more money”. But they might fall as barriers to entry, previously enshrined in law & tax code, have been removed, and competition prevails.

3.I can’t help but recall Franklin’s famous quote about those who would trade liberty for security. Right now it seems we’ve done just that. And if you look around at the jobless rates or the foreclosures or the number of people on this earth who are starving or living on $2/day or less, well it’s hard to argue that anyone is really very “secure”, either.